Visualizing the Tree of Life

Click on the image for a high resolution jpg file. Old older version with 76425 species is here. An interactive version is
here.

This is a drawing of the tree of life. Data from the Tree of Life
project. This project documents phylogeny of
organisms, i.e., the history of organismal lineages as they change
through time. It implies that different species arise from previous
forms via descent, and that all organisms are connected by the passage
of genes along the branches of the phylogenetic tree. The data used in
this drawing contains 93891 species, representing a tiny fraction of
the estimated 5 to 100 million species on Earth today. But even at this
scale, traditional graph/tree drawing algorithms could not give a good
view of this tree. In this drawing we employed a high performance
graph layout algorithm [1,2] that over come the perihperal effect of
force dircted algoriths, and gives an aesthetic layout of a tree
representing the genetic linkage of species. Gray branches lead to
species that are extinct. The drawing clearly shows the tree
structure. The root vertex ``Life on Earth'' (shown in red) sits near
the southwest of the tree; to its southwest are ``Green plants'' and its
descendants; to the southeast are animals. Fungi are just northwest of
it. There are many more animals than plants, a reflection of the data
itself. Also shown in red is Homo Sapiens.